Story Excerpt
Derailed
by Hûw Steer
She limped a few meters from the rails to get a good look at the crash site, already covered in a thickening layer of red dust.
“Well,” said Lowell, looking at the distinctly sideways nuclear steam train, “shit.”
Nobody heard the words but her. That was one of the many items jockeying for the hallowed status of “biggest problem” on her mental list. The dust storm that would be sweeping over this area for at least two days had filled the air with lovely scattering particles that rendered even the powerful radio aboard the train useless at any significant range. She could try to find a local transponder, but even those would be iffy in this weather.
It was just Lowell, her derailed locomotive, and the dust, out here in the endless desert of Mars.
Wincing, she limped back over to the locomotive. The train wasn’t completely sideways, thanks to some convenient rocks on which it had come to a very sudden halt, but the angle made hauling herself up onto the footplate that much harder. She slid into the cab, sealed the airlock behind her, and unscrewed her helmet. The process was accompanied by a fair amount of swearing.
“Sorry, old girl,” she said, patting the floor of the cab. “Though at least it was me, eh?” Someone had to crash eventually, she reflected. No railway network could go without such a failure forever, especially in Mars’ hostile wasteland. In many ways it was a miracle it had taken this long. On the one hand, having the chief engineer and designer of the entire Great Martian Railways project be the one to crash was a blessing. Nobody understood these trains like Lowell did.
On the other hand, she’d never live it down when she got back to the office. If I do get back to the office.
The Rocket wheezed in sympathy. Lowell checked the readout on the reactor screen, but it didn’t seem to be a deadly noise. One could never be sure with a compact, wheeled nuclear reactor, a colossal closed-loop steam turbine that drove two hundred tonnes of locomotive across the Martian desert. One could definitely never be sure when said nuclear reactor was tipped at forty-five degrees and fifty feet away from the rails it was designed to ride.
“What a mess,” Lowell muttered. “What a bloody mess.”
She tried to think back beyond the screaming metal chaos that had come between a perfectly ordinary goods run and their current derailed state. The Rocket had been chugging along at a steady three hundred kilometers per hour, comfortably in the middle of its capabilities. Behind the engine were a half dozen freight trucks, mostly empty. They had been full of heavy metals; uranium and iron from the mines on Utopia Planitia, which she’d lugged along one of their newer branch lines out to Arabia Terra, to the construction project at Rutherford Crater. She’d dropped off the freight, picked up a few bits and pieces to be returned, and then taken the outer loopback around to return home to Elysium. It was a simple journey. It should have been a simple journey.
There were only a handful of trains on the planet right now, so Lowell could safely take the same rails in the opposite direction. But Rutherford didn’t have a turntable yet, so a big loop of rail out and around, through the lowlands of Arabia, and reconnecting with the Elysium line several hundred kilometers away, had to do for turning. It had been seen as wasteful by many, but Noa Waters, the GMR project director, had pointed out that they’d need to lay rails out that way anyway eventually, to link up to the bases at Noachis, so they might as well get started. And so the rail-layers had been out in force, spitting out track like nobody’s business. Much of it sat gathering dust, yet to be honored with the presence of an actual train.
The section Lowell found herself on now had been one such section. She and the Rocket had been its first proper users—nobody had properly tested it before they came out. But the drones did, she thought. They checked. Control wasn’t mad enough to risk an engine on an entirely unsurveyed track. She fumbled for the map tablet in its holster, finding its screen cracked by the crash but still serviceable. No signal, of course. But the local files were still there. She brought up the surveillance photos and saw that yes, mere hours before she’d set off, the track had been a set of intact silvery lines sketched across the Martian landscape. Not even dusty. So what the hell had happened?
She took stock. There were emergency rations in a compartment at the bottom of the cab. There was also—and her leg protested as she reached awkwardly up for it—a medical kit, from which she grabbed some painkillers to tide her over as she awkwardly pulled off her suit to check whatever the injury was.
What there wasn’t a lot of was oxygen, and she could see why. The train had landed on rocks, and it had hit them hard, and though the emergency sealant had patched the buckled holes in the side of the cab, it hadn’t done so immediately. Lowell was breathing the emergency reserve air, which would last, at a stretch, for two days. Could be worse, she reflected. The jagged metal had somehow not done any direct damage to her leg; her suit was intact—but when she prodded the massive bruise, she felt, underneath a stab of absolute agony, something move that shouldn’t have. Fractured at least. She’d be on bed rest for days when she got back to Elysium. She fought down the urge to think if as she wrapped a pressure bandage tightly around the leg and a set of splints from the kit. It was almost as painful as pulling her suit back on. Once she had, though, she could splint the outside too, connecting the metal cuffs at ankle and knee with metal rods that screwed in for exactly this purpose. She’d be slow, but it would have to do.
She checked the reactor again. It was dormant, having been kicked out of active mode automatically by their sudden stop. The train was largely a baroque thing compared to most of the tech on colonized Mars; all physical valves and pipes and wheels, satisfyingly analog metalwork. The nuclear reactor was, of course, an exception to this rule. The complex readouts told Lowell that the temperature was at acceptable levels, that the internal pressure of the system was holding, that the water reserve . . .
Was rapidly decreasing. Shit. The pain in her leg suddenly a distant memory, she scrambled up the tilted floor, through the airlock, and down onto the ground. Her helmet lights barely cut through the thickening sandstorm. But they glinted off the water pouring out of the hole in the boiler tank, metal torn by the pointed rocks all the way into the vital organs of the Rocket. Much of the water was evaporating instantly in the low-pressure atmosphere, but some was wetting the sand down from orange to brown.
Damn it, damn it, damn it, Lowell’s internal monologue repeated as she grabbed the nearest patch kit which were stowed in external lockers at regular intervals along the outside of the train and carriages. Cursing her injured leg, she bent the carbon-composite panel into shape around the hole—it was just big enough, thankfully, and the rocks were no longer lodged in the hole, which was another blessing—but the hole was an awkward shape, and the panel didn’t flex nearly as much as it should have. Every second she struggled was more precious water steaming away.
She started with the heat gun. You couldn’t really weld in the deoxygenated air of Mars, but you could still warm up sticky carbon composite, and the stuff sagged under her invisible beam, clinging to the breached hull, sealing nice and tight. It took a few passes to get the bottom where the water was pouring—it was wet, after all—but Lowell got the patch to stick. She waited. No more water seemed to be emerging. She limped back to the cab, hauled herself up, and checked the reactor display through the window. No more leakage. But the number and bar for the water had dipped worryingly far into the amber, nearing red. With the reactor idling, it wasn’t an immediate problem . . . but if and when Lowell could get the engine going again, she’d only be able to go so fast and so far.
She went back to the breach and pulled another patch from the locker. She took her time over this one, adding a second layer of reinforcement to her repair, and then a third for good measure because why not? She cursed the necessity of design that had the water storage on the outside of the boiler and reactor, even on this planet. But they had needed to cool the steam again so it could be recycled into the reactor, and what better way than to just use the Martian lack of temperature to their advantage? She made a mental note to consider alternative designs, though, on the next generation of locomotives.
If I make it back to the drawing board, of course.
She took a slow lap of the locomotive, to the rails at the front of the train. Where the rails at the front of the train should have been. Lowell could see the rails behind the Rocket, but up here at the front there was nothing. Not even a hint of silver glint showed through the sand. But it was here, she thought. It was on the map; I could see it. She was no slave to technology; she wasn’t about to drive blindly into the night.
But the cab was at the back of the locomotive. There was a lot of metal between her and her view of the nearest section of rail. If she’d taken her eyes off it for a second to check the readouts, if she’d missed a gap, if the growing sandstorm had obscured her vision . . .
She limped forward. The sand in the air made seeing far impossible, but after a few minutes, she kicked something painfully hard with her dragging foot. Kneeling, she brushed dust away. Rail. There was track here. She started shuffling back along its length, back toward the crash, keeping her bad foot on the carbon-coated metal so she didn’t lose it. And then she did lose it twenty feet later, almost falling flat on her face. Dropping down awkwardly again, she scrabbled in the dust . . . and just got dust, dust, and more dust. These were the times when having a bit more high tech about her person would have been useful; a density scanner would have been star-sent, but her digging hands did the job. The rail ended, not jaggedly, not broken, but with a clean gap at the end of a section. Lowell went back, measured it by hand and eye: ten meters from the last set of connecting bolts, a whole section of rail, and then nothing, no sleepers, no metal, nothing. It wasn’t broken. It was missing.
Her hand found something hard in the dust. She scraped ever-compacting redness clear.
It wasn’t missing. The next rail segment was hanging from its bolts, almost straight down. Lowell reached for the next sleeper, brushed the compacted Martian brick, and then felt herself overbalancing and knew there was nothing she could do about it. She tipped over the edge and fell.